What Do I Do For A Living?

In order to understand why I still work, you have to know what I do for a living. First off, I’m proud to say that I work in technology as an electrical engineer.

In a nutshell, I’m one of a handful of people at my company that designs low level computer hardware that is used in a wide variety of consumer devices today. In fact, our technology powers digital cameras, cell phones, digital printers etc… You name it and our technology is probably inside in some form or another.

I absolutely love what I do for a living and there’s no way that I’d be able to continue designing computer hardware without the infrastructure that my company provides. I also have the luxury of working as an engineer knowing that I do not need the money at all. As a result, I can be a little more picky in deciding what I want to work on and why.

The other aspect about my job that I enjoy is that my company is very flexible about where I physically do my work. Because I can login to my computer from anywhere there’s an internet connection, I can work from home if I have to in case there’s an family matter that requires my attention.

The World Is Becoming Dominated By Tech

Besides loving what I do for a living, I also work at my day job so I don’t become obsolete. The world of technology moves very fast and if you stop to take a breath, then it can easily pass you by.

So while selling wedding linens online, running my blog and running my online store course is fun and very lucrative, it doesn’t really exercise my brain to the same extent that my hardware design job does. In fact, my day job allows me to stay on top of technology trends in both computer hardware and software that would be difficult to follow otherwise.

But why do I care? After all, if I don’t really need the money, then why work? Why should I bother keeping up with technology?

If you stop and think about it, more and more service professions are being taken over by technology every single day. For example, I just did my taxes last month. But instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to an accountant, I filed my taxes using a computer program for only about 50 bucks.

Instead of hiring a graphic design artist to create logos or manipulate graphics for my blog, I now use Adobe Photoshop. Instead of opening a brick and mortar store and hiring workers, I now have a computer server take orders for me online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The other day, I shopped at my local grocery store and noticed that 90% of the checkout aisles were now populated with self-checkout machines. These new self-checkout machines enable just one human worker to oversee 8 or more checkout lines simultaneously! And I’m willing to bet that some supermarket workers got laid off as a result!

If you take a moment and look around, you’ll realize that technology is creeping its way into every part of our lives. And if you are not careful, your profession or business could be replaced by a piece of technology as well if you stop paying attention.

Don’t Underestimate Technology

So how do you stop this from happening to you? In a nutshell, you have only 2 choices. You can continue to ignore everything that is happening around you, or you can embrace it!

A byproduct of running my blog is that I receive emails from readers every single day asking for business advice.

“Steve, I want to make money online with an online store but I don’t know anything about websites or computers. Can you help me?”

“Steve, I just want someone to set everything up for me and focus on the business. Would you be willing to do it?”

Much to my dismay, the majority of emails that I receive are from readers who are either afraid of or want absolutely nothing to do with technology. In fact, the most common question I get asked is…

I just want to sell things online and make money. Where can I find someone to do all of the computer stuff?

Wanting to focus on the business is all fine and good, but if you are opening an “online” business, shouldn’t you at least understand the basics about how the “online” portion works?

Here’s what usually happens next.

• Entrepreneur pays a lot of money to a developer or service to create a website for them along with some custom features.
• Entrepreneur has very little grasp about the extent and work involved in making certain changes. He or she ends up wasting a lot of money on features that are not well thought out
• Entrepreneur’s lack of knowledge leads to a major delay in launching website.
• Entrepreneur finds some bugs and has to contact the developer each time there’s a problem. Meanwhile, potential business is lost
• Entrepreneur contacts developer for every little change that needs to be made. The costs start to add up and the turnaround time is extremely long

I have a friend that found someone on Elance to make some small edits to his online store. And while the developer implemented the features he requested properly, he did it in such a way that the code was extremely fragile and unmaintainable. Therefore, every time he needed to make any minor change, he was forced to pay the developer’s hourly fee.

How To Stay Relevant

So how can you avoid this situation? The answer is that you need to invest some time to learn the basics! After all, if you want to run a business online, you should at least understand how things work! That is why I always advise the students of my class to read up on the fundamentals of html/css and how websites work so they get a feel for what is going on.

You don’t have to become an expert, you just need to possess a working knowledge of how to read the language of the web! Most importantly, you must have the right attitude. It’s never too late to learn new things and you have to be willing to try.

Money Now Is Not Money Later

So where am I going with all of this? While my wife and I make a good deal of money selling linens online, we both realize that our business could become obsolete if we are not careful. If we don’t keep up with the trends, we can be overtaken at a moments notice.

So by living and breathing technology on a day to day basis, we hope to stay on top of things and anticipate the next set of changes we need to make in our business and daily lives.

Is there anything truly special about my day job? Probably not. But my day job is my hedge against the future. After all, technology can’t replace me if I’m the one creating the technology right?

Running A Business Is Like Raising A Child

The best analogy that I can come up with that even compares to starting an online business is raising a child. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, I went out and read every single parenting blog, magazine and advice column that I could find. Not only was I a regular on the parenting forums but I also purchased a series of books on raising children which covered everything from how to sooth a crying baby all the way to how to raise a teenager. Yes, you read that right. I was so gung-ho that I skipped ahead to the teenage years!!!

One of my greatest fears as a new parent was that I would not be able to sooth my daughter and stop her from crying. So as I was doing my research, I focused a lot of my attention on articles which taught me how to calm a new born baby. I read about swaddling. I read about the patented “Happiest Baby On The Block” technique. Hell I even watched a video about how to interpret baby sounds so that I could understand the “language” that my baby would speak. (Incidentally, trying to understand “baby language” is both fun and hilarious. Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward.)

Anyways up until my daughter was born, I felt so confident and cocky that I knew everything there was to know about calming a child that I started to scoff at some of my friends who weren’t sleeping at night because their children wouldn’t stop crying. If only they knew what I knew! If only they had done the impeccable research that I’d done!

My Daughter Is Born And All Hell Breaks Loose

All of my confidence and training went out the window when my little daughter was born. Once we took her home from the hospital, she was absolutely inconsolable. Every night, she would cry uncontrollably and I couldn’t get her to stop. I tried everything that I learned from my vast research. I tried swaddling her. I tried burping her. I tried bouncing her. Nothing worked at all! I tried interpreting her body movements and her “baby language” to no avail. All of my book training went out the window and all I could do was panic.

After 3 sleepless nights, I did what any desperate parent would do. I drove like a madman to Babies R Us and purchased every single baby soothing contraption on the market. The cashiers chuckled behind the cash register as they watched me scramble and grab everything they had on their shelves. MAKE WAY! CLUELESS DAD ON AISLE 5!!!

Despite blowing a large amount of cash, still nothing worked. I was tired, frustrated and all I could think of was that those books were full of s$&^. All of those blogs and forums that I participated in were completely useless in the wake of my newborn daughter! All of that time and training had gone to waste!

Finally in one last act of desperation, my wife and I decided to pay the extra money and went to see a specialist…and she helped us out immediately. By showing us the proper techniques on how to hold our baby girl and how to sooth her first hand really opened our eyes. There was no book that could teach this!! After receiving some more personal instruction, we finally settled on our own unique method of soothing our daughter that no book or website ever mentioned.

It turned out that our daughter liked to be swaddled, inserted into a sling and bounced up and down in a precise cadence that matched the theme song of the 80′s cartoon “The Gummy Bears”. Go figure!

What Does This Have To Do With Online Business?

So what is the point of telling you my crazy newborn story? It’s to illustrate that like raising a child, every business is different. Even though there’s a lot of free general information out there, there are many subtleties to running a business that can only be learned through experience and guidance. Just because you read about something online does not mean that you’ll know how to apply it correctly.

After all, when was the last time you read a generic business book or blog post and found that all of the material exactly applied to your business? Every business is going to be different and every business will face its own unique set of obstacles. That is why when it comes to running a business, general information is not enough!

So why do so many would be entrepreneurs invest large amounts of money and time on a business based on general information they’ve found online for free? Why do so many people place such large bets on conceptual knowledge they read about from a book or blog post? The truth is that this is the wrong way to go about it.

The right way is to get formal training and advice tailored specifically to the type of business you want to start. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have someone who is experienced show you all of the ropes. It will save you time, money and a lot of heart ache.

Formal Training Tailored To You

So why am I telling you all of this? If you are interested in dipping your toe in the world of ecommerce, then take my free mini course. But if you want to learn the ins and outs of running a successful online store, you need to checkout my course on how to create a profitable online store.

In addition to the course materials and over 35 hours of video that you’ll receive, you’ll have access to my expertise. I will be here to answer your emails and I will hold weekly office hours where you can ask me specific questions that pertain directly to your business. And since I run an online store of my own, it is my job to stay on top of the latest ecommerce trends.

As I mentioned above, every business venture is different so why waste time wading through tons of generic info that might not apply to you? Do you want to struggle through many sleepless nights with your business? Or would you rather find someone who can actually help. The choice is up to you.

Here are some of the highlights for 2011

• Year over year revenue grew 39%
• Year over year profit grew 44%
• Except for just 2 months out of the year, our store had higher revenues than the previous year’s highest month.
• Our SG&A went down as a percentage of revenue due to the fact that we had no major travel expenses.
• Our average order size remained relatively flat but the pure number of orders per day went way up
• Our margins increased significantly due to the introduction of higher end products
• Website traffic increased by about 31%

As you can see from the numbers above, we had another killer year with over 44% growth! If you look at all of the years that we’ve been in existence, that is now 3 straight years of at least double digit increases!

To put things in perspective, if my wife had stuck with her six figure day job, she probably wouldn’t be receiving double digit raises every year. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I got a double digit raise at my current job! It really pays to have your own business on the side and the internet allows you to that with very little upfront risk.

Other Highlights

In addition to a pretty healthy uptake in business, we were also featured in a few major publications and our handkerchiefs were even used in a celebrity wedding though I don’t have permission to publish the name.

• Our personalized handkerchiefs were featured in the annual Martha Stewart Weddings DIY Issue
• Our tea napkins were featured in the Jan/Feb issue of Lonny Magazine
• Our cocktail napkins made the “Homes” section of the Wall Street Journal in the Dec 10th, 2011 issue!

Breaking Down The Numbers And What We Did Differently This Year

The bottom line is that more traffic equals more sales. The reason our revenues increased as much as they did was because our traffic increased by a proportional amount. And these increases were a direct result of our search engine optimization efforts, our increased advertising spend and word of mouth.

Last year, we already ranked in the top 4 spots for our targeted keywords phrases. So this year, instead of trying to get all of those keywords to the #1 spots, I started focusing on long tail keywords that were just shy of the front page. It turns out that our online store ranked for a whole bunch of keywords that were in the top 20 and required just a little push to make the front. These extra long tail keywords contributed to much of the traffic gains for the store.

In addition, the direct traffic to our store increased by 39% as word of mouth continued to spread. Seriously, we’ve been recommended by many of our existing customers as evidenced by some of the phone calls and emails we’ve received.

We Revisited Our Adwords Campaigns

The bad thing about running an Adwords account is that campaigns can quickly go stale. Since I had a lot going on in previous years, I’d been neglecting our Adwords account and many of our campaigns got out of whack. So in the first quarter of last year, I did a major overhaul of all of our advertising campaigns and got back on track.

For keywords that performed well, I maxed out our bids to the point where we were getting the most clicks possible while still making a profit. For keywords that weren’t converting well, I made the keyword phrases more specific to improve the conversion rate.

We Introduced More Product Lines

As I had mentioned in a previous post, the textile industry in China is in major flux. Fabric prices have been shooting through the roof due to increased labor costs and labor shortages so we’ve had to adjust by continually finding new backup vendors to add to the mix. Thankfully, last year things settled down a bit and my wife was able to introduce a few new products lines to our store.

We now carry products that span across the entire gamut of price points. In other words, we now carry lower end products, middle range goods and a new high end line of hankies that are imported from Germany. By increasing our high end product lines, we’ve managed to increase margins which have added to the amount of profit per conversion.

Lowlights For 2011 And What’s Ahead

Despite all of the great profit growth, unfortunately there were some lowlights for the store as well. For example, both the average number of pages per visit and the average time on site went down about 7% compared to the prior year.

Based on my last article about why my online store needs a mobile website and how to tell if you need one too, I attribute this reduction in time on site to the increased number of cell phone users that have shopped at our store and the lack of optimization for these customers on our part.

There’s no doubt about it. The number of mobile customers is going to explode this coming year and I’m currently in the process of taking appropriate action. In fact, I’ve been working on the mobile site for my online store for the past 2 weekends and it’s almost ready for prime time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, most of my competitors don’t have a mobile site up yet so I’m hoping that having one will allow me to steal some business away from them. If you are curious about creating a mobile site of your own, I’ve documented everything that I had to go through in creating mine and I’ll be sure to have a series of blog posts about it.

There are many different approaches to making a site mobile and I evaluated each option thoroughly before deciding to completely gut my site and custom code most of the pages from scratch. In any case, I’ll keep you all posted once the mobile site goes live so you can check it out. Here’s to a successful 2012!

The Best Blog Posts Of 2011

Let’s face it. We are all very busy with our lives so I know that most of you don’t have the time to read every single post on this blog. So, I thought that I’d take some time and highlight some of the best articles of 2011. Enjoy!

Fun Articles

• How To Improve Your Online Store Website By Negotiating With Your Toddler
• How To Increase Sales For Your Small Business By Potty Training Your Child

Entrepreneurship

• From 0 To Quit: Why You Should Start An Online Store Today And Why Niche Shops Are So Powerful
• Why Embracing The Turtle Will Help Your Online Business Succeed
• Why Etsy Stores Are At A Disadvantage Compared To Online Stores That Own Their Domain
• The Secrets To Being Successful With Any Business You Launch
• Niche Affiliate Site Or Online Store | Which Should I Launch If I Want To Quit My Job?
• Dropshipping Vs Affiliate Marketing: Which Online Business Will Make You More Money?

Ecommerce Related

• How We Use Google Analytics To Improve Our Online Store
• How To Install An Open Source Shopping Cart And Start Your Online Store In Under 5 Minutes
• Why Ranking High In Organic Search Doesn’t Cut It Anymore When It Comes To Online Stores
• How To Get More Facebook Fans With A Facebook Reveal Tab Or Fan Gate
• 3 Usability Issues With Our Online Store Website That Were Uncovered By A Clueless Customer
• Are These Ecommerce Mistakes Driving Newbie Shoppers Away From Your Online Store?
• Ecommerce Mistakes That Make You Look Like An Amateur

Thanks again and here’s to an even more successful 2012!
Take Care,
Steve

Getting Punished For Being Honest

Here’s just a sampling of what I had to go through in order to install one piece of software that we use everyday for our business. Without this software, we can not sell personalized items in our store. So get this. Even though I completely reinstalled the program using my original and authentic installation disk, the software would not run because I needed to reactivate it!

With programs like Microsoft Windows, reactivation can be done completely online. However, this company required me to contact them directly to get a new activation code. Not only was this a major hassle but I also had to wait until Monday morning before I could contact support which meant that the weekend’s orders could not be processed.

So finally Monday rolls around, I get a hold of support and they inform me that my software was registered using a different address, email address and phone number than before and that they couldn’t reactivate my software unless I used the original information. But the kicker was that they also couldn’t tell me what info I had used in the past.

After arguing with the sales rep for about 20 minutes, she finally relented and gave me a new activation code. But the damage was already done. This ordeal wasted several days of my valuable time and caused numerous delays with our order fulfillment. The worst part? I paid good money for this software, so why was I getting punished and hassled just because someone else decided to copy it illegally?

More Ridiculous Copy Protection Shenanigans

Getting a new computer also meant that I was forced to upgrade my operating system to Windows 7 from Windows XP. And it just so happens that one of my software CDs only has the XP version which won’t run on Windows 7. So I contact support and they provide me with a download link to the Windows 7 version of the program. Cool! Everything is all good until I try and run the software.

The program requires the CD to be in the actual CD drive in order to run!!! Since I didn’t have the Windows 7 version of the CD, I had to contact support and have them send me another one. Another week lost and once again I was getting punished for paying for my software!

More Chaos And A Lesson Learned

In the midst of all the chaos, we also had to deal with one very annoying customer issue. The other day we received a surprise return in our mailbox. But it was not just any ordinary return. This particular lady had the gall to ask for a refund for goods that she had already used. Actually, the word “used” is a mild way of putting it. To be specific, she purchased a set of napkins and returned them to us completely filthy and then demanded a refund.

When we told her that we didn’t accept returns that are not in resell-able condition (not to mention nasty used napkins), she claimed that the napkins were this dirty when she received them. Yeah right…

Your return policy says 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed. I’m not satisfied.

Since it wasn’t worth having her throw a fit and getting all upset over 35 bucks, we begrudgingly gave her a refund.

The funny thing though is that this one isolated incident made my wife and I completely reevaluate our return policy. Currently, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee but this lady pissed us off so much that we seriously considered making all sales final. No returns period.

But once we calmed down, we thought about our ordeal with the sewing software companies and realized that we were probably feeling exactly how they felt whenever someone copied their software. And here we were considering some drastic anti-return measures to prevent future customers from cheating us out of money.

After a while, we realized that canceling our return policy just because of this one crazy lady was ridiculous. But man was it tempting. As a business owner and a human being, it’s really easy to overreact especially when you feel completely ripped off and taken advantage of. But it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture and focus on your main customer base, the customers that you care about.

Is your business making important decisions based on a few vocal customers? Are you making your business worse for the majority of customers because of a few bad seeds that are abusing the system?

Now I don’t want to discount the importance of protecting your business profits, but I just hate it when a small group of people spoil things for the rest of us. Let’s try to not to let that happen with our small businesses shall we?

Oh Tortoise, Oh Wise One

But something interesting happened to me during my late twenties after I got married. I started having less and less time to myself and I was forced to set a schedule in order to find free time for my side projects. When my wife gave birth to our first child, I had even less time and on top of everything else, I was sleep deprived as well.

But strangely enough, the busiest periods of my life coincided with some of my biggest accomplishments. The reason? The tortoise like mindset. Since I had much smaller blocks of time to work on stuff, I had to tackle every project piece by piece on a set schedule. Instead of working 20 hours over a weekend and burning myself out, I simply picked a pace that I could sustain indefinitely and all of sudden things started to click.

Working on my side projects became part of my lifestyle and I rarely felt pressured or frustrated due to a lack of time. For example, Sunday nights became my blog posting night. Sunday mornings before the kids got up became my online store improvement time. On Thursday nights, I would work on my online store course.

Tortoise Like Results

Most people who adopt the “hare” like mindset often make significant progress in a short period of time but then burn out and stop working altogether. The beauty of the tortoise is that even though you might not be fast, you are always making constant progress towards your goals. And if you manage to integrate your business related tasks into a consistent weekly schedule, you’ll be surprised at how much you can accomplish in a short period of time.

When my wife and I first started our wedding handkerchief shop, we devoted every Sunday to the business. In fact, it was penciled into our calendar as part of a lifestyle change that we both agreed upon until the store was up and running. We purposely did not schedule anything on that day and we worked on our store consistently every week. As a result, it took a little longer for us to launch but our store made huge strides every week. Today, we still maintain a set schedule where we add new content to keep our website fresh.

MyWifeQuitHerJob.com is also a great example of the “tortoise” mindset at its best. For the past 3 years, I’ve written at least one blog post per week and to tell you the truth, I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s subconscious. Writing blog posts has become a part of my lifestyle. It is ingrained into my schedule and if I don’t write, I get this nagging feeling of regret.

Even though the blog started out “extremely” slow (Things didn’t pick up until after well over a year), today this website attracts over 38K visitors a month and my email newsletter grows by 20-40 people every single day. In the back of my mind, I always knew that my blog would make it to this point but I had no clue how long it would take and I didn’t really care. I simply picked a sustainable pace and made blogging a part of my life.

Finally, my most recent “tortoise” like accomplishment has been with my Create A Profitable Online Store course. When I launched on March 2nd, I had no video content whatsoever. The first 25 students that signed up did so based on good faith that I was going to pump out some great video tutorials…and I delivered on a consistent weekly basis.

Today, there are over 60+ videos in my course library representing well over 30 hours of material on how to run a successful online store. Because preparing the material and shooting the footage takes me about 10 minutes for every minute of video produced, this means I’ve spent over 300 hours on my course in the past 7 months. Could I have done this in one straight 13 day span? No way! I can barely find a nice 2 hour block of time with 2 kids!

The Moral Of The Story

So what am I trying to say here? When it comes to starting a business, it’s not a sprint. If you try and cram everything in a mad rush to launch, you will burnout…guaranteed. Instead of being in such a hurry, simply pick a pace that you can maintain indefinitely and focus on the long term for a period of at least a year or more.

Being the tortoise is not glamorous by any means. You won’t be able to brag how you made X dollars in just a 2 weeks. You won’t be able to say that you started a full blown business in under a month. But you will make steady progress long after those rabbits have quit and moved on to something else.

Make Sure You Set Up Ecommerce Tracking

Google Analytics has many ecommerce specific features which are not setup by default with the standard javascript snippet. While many shopping cart packages support Google Analytics ecommerce tracking out of the box, you sometimes have to enable this feature in the admin panel of your shopping cart because it involves sending Google all of your conversion rate information. And by all your information, I really mean ALL which is why some people get a little apprehensive about giving all of this data to the big G.

For example, once you have the full blown ecommerce tracking set up, Google will know exactly which products you sell, how much you are making as well as how much you charge for shipping. However, while you are sending Google a lot of private information, they will never access your records without your permission and the tracking that comes along with it is invaluable. Trust me.

In any case, once you have ecommerce tracking set up is when the fun begins. Here are a few things that Google Analytics will help you track.

• The total amount of revenue broken down by products sold and correlated with every traffic source that you receive
• Your conversion rate depending on the traffic source. Do certain mediums convert better than others?
• The demographic data of your customers. Is someone in New York more likely to spend more than someone from Wyoming? Is someone from Georgia more likely to buy a certain item from your shop?

As you can see, ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics essentially allows you to gather and cross reference many key pieces of data for your online store. Very valuable stuff.

Refining Our Google Adwords Ads And Our Product Mix

So what are some of the primary ways we use Google Analytics? Probably one of the most important uses of Google Analytics is to refine our Google Adwords ads. By tracking all of the search queries that customers type in when searching and clicking on our Adwords ads, we know exactly what the customer is looking for and we can adjust both our ad keywords and our landing pages accordingly.

For example, if a customer arrives at our website looking for something that we do not carry, we can add negative keywords to our Adwords campaigns. Negative keywords prevent Adwords ads from showing up when a customer types in a query that contains a specific keyword. As a result, we save money with our ad spend because we will never pay for ads for customers that don’t stand a chance of buying from us.

Another way we use Google Analytics is to decide on what new products to add to our online store. For example, if we look at our reports and find that a disproportionate number of people are searching for “European Handkerchiefs”, we may decide to carry them in our store. In fact, we added European imported lace handkerchiefs to our product mix earlier this year for precisely this reason.

Focusing Our SEO Efforts

Once you have ecommerce tracking setup, you can immediately start correlating your revenues based on which keywords customers are using to arrive on your online store through organic search. For example, when we found that our conversion rate for the term “ladies handkerchiefs” was on the order of 15-20%, we immediately started focusing our SEO efforts around this particular keyword.

Today, our online store fluctuates between the top 2 spots for this search term and it brings in a good amount of revenue every single month for free. Without keyword analytics, it’s hard to tell which search terms will bring you the most revenues. After all, you only have a finite amount of resources and the only way to succeed is to focus your time and effort on activities which will maximize your profits.

Tracking Marketing Campaigns

The problems that most brick and mortar stores face when launching an ad campaign in a newspaper or magazine for example is that it’s difficult to determine how much in sales and foot traffic were generated as a direct result of the advertisement.

With an online store however, it’s very easy to track all of your online marketing campaigns via click tracking in Google Analytics. For example, whenever we send out a broadcast email to our store email list, we insert a link to our online store within the email that is specifically tagged with our promotion. As a result, whenever someone clicks on that link to shop at our store, we know exactly which marketing campaign resulted in that new customer. Analytics will also tell us exactly how much money we made as a direct result of the email promotion.

Using similar principles, we also know which sources of traffic generate the most revenues for our store and can make the necessary adjustments. This past year, conversions from both Bing and Yahoo have started increasing significantly which indicates that we may want to focus more efforts on these 2 search engines. In addition, traffic from Facebook has eeked into the top 10 this past year as well.

Tracking Visitor Information

One other trend that we’ve been noticing lately via analytics is that more and more people are now shopping on their mobile devices. This month, over 5% of our revenues have resulted from orders placed from a mobile phone. At around the same point last year, this number hovered around 1% or less. Depending on the percentage of mobile traffic to our store, we may want to consider creating a separate design specifically optimized for mobile phones.

Another way we use Analytics is to track where our visitors are coming from. This comes in especially handy when deciding how to allocate our advertising dollars. For example, certain wedding websites charge based on how many regions you wish to display advertisements for your store. Because it’s way too expensive to advertise nationally, we use Google Analytics to tell us which states bring us the most revenues and purchase our ads based on this information. After all, there’s no point in paying for ads if there’s not a lucrative market.

Conclusion

These are just a few ways that we use Google Analytics to improve our store. Just because you run a small shop does not mean that you can’t track customer behavior. Google Analytics is very powerful and completely free so there’s no reason not to use it. What are some ways you use analytics for your business?

Daddy, I don’t want to go swimming anymore!

I didn’t really blame her for saying those words. After all, it was clear that she didn’t have fun and neither did I because she was fighting me the entire time. And even though it was just her first lesson, my wife and I questioned whether she was too young to learn and whether swimming lessons were going to work out for her.

But since we paid for a package of 8 lessons, we kept taking her and with each subsequent lesson, she started fighting us less and less. In the beginning, we had to drag her into the pool but by week 3, she started having fun out there. It all started with her kicking her feet and splashing me with water which made her giggle. Then she started blowing bubbles in the water and getting her face wet.

By week 4, something must have clicked inside of her brain because all of a sudden she started jumping in from the side of the pool. She started going down the water slide. She started dunking herself in the water and propelling herself forward. The rest is history!

Nothing Will Change Unless You Work At It

You can’t start something new and expect to become an expert right away. The problem with human nature is that we tend to stick with what we are already good at and practice what we already know. When my daughter first started swimming, she hated it because it was foreign to her.

The water made her eyes hurt and she kept choking and gagging whenever she forgot to hold her breath. When my wife and I contemplated taking her out of swim class, little did we realize that we both experienced the exact same feelings when we first started our online business.

I still vividly remember the grand opening for our online store. Actually “grand” is the exact opposite word to describe that day. We didn’t make a single sale and we second guessed ourselves the entire time. By the end of week 1 and zero sales, I wondered whether this whole online thing was going to work out for us.

My wife questioned whether she would be able to stay at home with our kids without making major sacrifices. We both thought about closing up shop and calling it a day in order to save face! After all, it was both disheartening and embarrassing to tell our friends that we hadn’t sold a darn thing whenever they asked.

But since it was so cheap to maintain the website and we didn’t have any better business ideas, we stuck with it. And slowly but surely our fortunes started to change. We kept the information mill churning and experimented with different customer acquisition strategies whenever we had free time.

We made subtle tweaks and constantly improved our product selection and our website. Then at around the 6 month mark, something clicked and we started getting both search engine customers as well as large orders from event planners and buyers with large spending budgets.

No One Is Born An Expert

While I would love to say that my wife and I are special and that we simply have an innate talent for business, that would be a big time lie. In fact prior to launching our online store, we had zero experience at running a business or putting up websites. We had no knowledge of web development and we had never started a business before.

As a result, we struggled big time early on. But you know what? Eventually, things sunk in and we started seeing the big picture. Whereas we started out by copying other people’s strategies, we eventually started coming up with some of our own and going with the flow.

The point I want to emphasize is that our success didn’t have so much to do with talent or smarts as it did with actually trying something new and learning from our mistakes.

Not Being Good At Something Is Your Choice

We are all humans and by nature we are programmed to stick with things that we are comfortable doing. We tend to put more effort into our strengths and we “like” doing what we are already good at. But at some point, you have to take a step back and remember how you became good at the things you do.

I absolutely hate it when someone emails and asks me something along the lines of “Steve, I’m comfortable with creating websites and the technical stuff but I’m just not good at marketing and sales. Can I still succeed?”

Well S#$%, if you are not good at marketing and sales then you need to start learning or hire someone to teach or help you out! Just because you aren’t good at something now doesn’t mean you can’t become good at it later. You just have to have the right mindset and keep an open mind to learn.

So what am I trying to say here? Instead of resigning yourself to “not being good” at something, why not give it your best shot and try to learn? If you are willing to put in constant effort for many months or years instead of giving up after a few weeks, you will go far. I guarantee it. If my little 3 year old can go from choking and sinking like a rock in the swimming pool to the doggie paddling toddler she is today, so can you!

Help!! I need help!! Kyle pooped in the tub again!! Come quick!!!

Naturally, my wife stopped her shopping spree and helped me clean things up. Yuck!! By the time she got back to her computer a good 45 minutes had elapsed.

Much to her dismay, when she got back to the computer to resume shopping, her shopping cart was empty!!! All of that hard work and she had lost it all because the online store she was shopping at had timed out and emptied out her cart. I will now attempt to recreate our conversation afterwards.

Wife: S#$%! F#$&! What the hell! I lost everything ! I had so many cute outfits in my cart and it took me forever to find all that stuff.

Me: Yeah that sucks….How much was in your shopping cart?

Wife: I don’t know, 700 maybe?!? I hate this store. Never shopping here again

Me: WHAT!?!?!? 700 dollars?? My entire wardrobe doesn’t cost that much!!!! What the hell!!! Do you think we are made of money?!?!

Wife: Well don’t worry about it. I’m not buying anything from this store anymore. It’ll take forever to find the stuff again

Me: (Feeling a sigh of relief) Oh….darn…..I know how much you liked that stuff (feigning concern). I feel horrible…absolutely terrible…

Wife: Shut up. Just for that, I’m spending more at the next shop

Persistent Shopping Carts

The reality is that many shopping carts behave this way. If you close your browser session or if you wait too long, many online stores will empty the contents of the cart. As a result, if a customer returns after a long hiatus of shopping, they will lose what they’ve added.

In many cases, this can cost you a sale because not everyone shops and makes a purchase in a single sitting. Just as an experiment, I asked a bunch of my friends whether they shop this way. And surprisingly, many of them use an online store like a wishlist. They put what they want in their cart, think about it and then return later. And more often than not, they shut down their browser and let things sit a bit before making a purchase.

In fact, looking at our online store statistics, a good 25 percent of customers visit our store more than once before making a purchase. The best way to deal with these customers is to make sure that whatever they put in their shopping cart stays in their shopping cart until they return and are ready to make a purchase. This is what is called a persistent shopping cart.

Implementing A Persistent Shopping Cart

This feature has been on my list for a very long time but I’ve been dragging my feet because strangely enough, there’s no plugin that does this for my shopping cart. Now this feature is very important for our online store for one main reason, personalization. When people shop at our store, then often put up to 8-10 items in their carts at a time and many of these products involve personalization with a special message.

What also ends up happening is that customers take a long time to shop because they want to think about what they want to write and sometimes they have to confer with their significant other before deciding on a message. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to lose everything you typed in just because you took an extended break?

So it was a no brainer, I had to spin my own solution. Here are 3 possible solutions that I came up with. I apologize in advance if this is next section is a bit more technical than usual.

Extend The Session Timeout Period

By default, the session length for my server is about 15 minutes long. What this means is that my server will hold the contents of a customer’s cart in system memory for 15 minutes of idle time before emptying everything out. So, a logical solution to this problem would be to simply extend this timeout period.

The problem with this solution is that it greatly increases the memory requirements for your online store. By increasing the timeout period for your shop, you essentially have to hold a customer’s shopping cart information in main memory for much longer periods of time which effectively increases the amount of main memory you need to run your website. This solution is clearly not scalable because main memory is a precious resource.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t solve the problem when a customer shuts down their browser or waits for 2 weeks before returning. Do you really want to keep their shopping cart lying around using up precious compute resources for 2 weeks? Probably not…

Store The Cart Contents In A Cookie

Another solution is to use cookies to store the contents of their cart on their computer. Cookies are little files that websites put on the client’s computer in order to store certain pieces of information so a website can recognize a customer when they return. By placing a cookie with the shopping cart contents on the client computer, you can effectively store their shopping cart for as long as you like!

The problem with this solution is that the cookie size is limited to 4K on most browsers. Therefore, if a customer’s shopping cart is large and exceeds this value, certain products in their shopping cart will be lost.

The Best Solution

The best solution and the way I ultimately decided to solve this problem was to use a combination of cookies and my shopping cart database. Here’s what I came up with.

Whenever a customer enters my store, I place a cookie on their computer that is set to expire whenever I feel like it. This cookie contains a secret id which I use to tag certain products in my database. Whenever a customer places an item in their shopping cart, I also store the product in my database and tag it with this secret id.

This way, I can keep track of everything that the customer is interested in based on this secret id which is stored on their computer in the form of a cookie. If they choose to leave for a long time and come back, I look for the presence of this cookie and restore the contents of their shopping cart based on my database which is present for as long as I want it to be.

The downside to this solution is that if a customer abandons their shopping cart, I will accumulate a lot of junk in my database which needs to be periodically cleaned up. So to solve that problem, I set up a CRON job or automated task to automatically clean up the database every single night and remove items that exceed a certain age threshold.

I’m still in the throes of testing my additions to my store and hope to be live with this new feature by the end of the week. The best part is that by storing your abandoned shopping carts, you can also better observe your customers shopping patterns as well.